SEO Audit Checklist: How to Locate Issues That Make a Website Inaccessible to Google

Your web assets may have an excellent domain rating, a large number of backlinks, high-quality content, and numerous keywords. However, if technical and on-page issues are neglected, they will harm the website’s visibility in search engines and consequently its traffic and conversion rate. An SEO audit checklist will help you identify problems that require your immediate attention.

An SEO audit checklist is not simply a list of issues. It is crucial to sort out problems worth fixing from those that will not make any difference to your website. In addition, an SEO auditor should understand why particular issues need attention and what benefits their solution brings.

SEO Audit Definition

An SEO audit refers to a comprehensive analysis of a website’s technical and content performance, visibility in search engines, user-friendliness, and other factors. A standard checklist will normally include the following:

• Website crawling and indexing

• Technical SEO

• Keyword strategy

• Page titles

• Content quality

• Internal linking

• Mobile usability

• Website speed

• Structured data

• Backlink profile

• Organic traffic and rankings

An SEO audit checklist is essential because it allows you to systematically address the most critical issues rather than attempting to resolve everything independently.

SEO Audit Checklist: 21 Issues to Address

1. Google indexing issues

The first thing to do when you are undertaking an SEO audit is to check if your website is crawled and indexed correctly. Please verify this information in Google Search Console.

Ideally, every service, product, and information page should be listed there. If some of your valuable web pages are not indexed, it will be pointless trying to optimize their content. First, you need to figure out why they are excluded from indexes and resolve the technical issues.

A few problems that may prevent a page from being indexed may include:

• robot.txt directives

• duplicate URLs

• noindex tags

• server-side errors

2. robots.txt analysis

Robots.txt is a file that contains instructions for search engine robots about which pages should not be crawled. One of the technical SEO best practices is to ensure that the following are not blocked:

• Important pages

• Directories with CSS files

• JS files

• XML sitemaps

Ideally, robots.txt should allow crawlers to access all pages that should be indexed. It is necessary to go over the file line by line and ensure that nothing suspicious is there. Even if one line is placed incorrectly, the entire website may be blocked.

3. Sitemap review

The next step in an SEO audit involves the website’s sitemap. Here is what you need to do:

• Make sure all URLs in the sitemap match the canonical tags.

• Remove all broken URLs

• Take out pages that should not be indexed

• Double-check whether the sitemap is submitted to Google Search Console.

• Verify that Google crawls the URLs listed in the sitemap

Ideally, a sitemap should only contain canonical, indexable, and relevant URLs that have not been removed. Each entry should be checked for validity.

4. Page titles and meta descriptions

The titles of pages appear on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), which is why it is essential to ensure that they are appropriate, distinctive, and enticing to the viewers. It is important to mention that every single page has to have a different title that reflects the content of the particular page accurately. For instance, instead of using generic SEO services, the company that offers on-page SEO services may provide the location as part of the title, for example, SEO Services in Delhi for Better Google Rankings.

A relevant meta description has to be interesting and informative so as to make users interested in the description. Though the meta description does not have a direct impact on the search ranking of the page, it can increase the click-through rate (CTR). Therefore, the descriptions have to be unique and provide distinct wording and expressions.

5. Keyword analysis

Another critical task included in an SEO audit checklist is keyword analysis. Each page should have clearly defined keywords. However, there may be instances where keywords are misplaced or do not match the page’s topic, content, or search intent. During your audit, you should also determine the following:

• Your primary keyword

• What users are looking for

• Whether the page answers the search intent and questions

• Whether the secondary questions are addressed

• Whether your page is better than the competitor’s snippets

For example, suppose keywords include "SEO audit," "SEO checklist," "SEO tips," or "SEO tools." In that case, your page should be able to answer the following questions:

• What is an SEO audit?

• Why is it important?

• How to perform an SEO audit?

• Does an SEO audit checklist exist?

6. Thin content and outdated content issues

It is normal for some pages to have less content. Nevertheless, each relevant page should have adequate information. When conducting an SEO audit, you should identify thin, irrelevant, low-quality content in order to update, remove, or consolidate it. Among the thin content issues are

• Missing information

• Unnecessary repetition

• Low search intent

• Unanswered questions

• Lack of topical coverage

• Little traffic

When addressing thin content, it is advisable to prioritize high-traffic pages. However, when pruning, you should always keep your target audience in mind.

7. Internal linking issues

Internal linking helps people navigate different sections of the website. Therefore, you can utilize them to guide the search engines in finding your website's web pages. When doing an SEO audit, one of the things you can check is pages with relatively high importance but with few internal links pointing to them. For instance, a blog post on keyword research can be linked to:

• A service page for SEO services

• Another blog post on keyword research

• An article about technical SEO

• An SEO audit checklist

It's best to make internal links relevant and natural rather than focusing on keyword-rich anchor text. Good internal linking will also help you prioritize pages that have not received enough attention.

8. Broken links and redirects

Broken links make it hard for users to experience your website smoothly. In addition, they also increase the complexity of website maintenance. That is why it is always important to ensure that there are no broken links both internally and externally. A few things to address when looking for broken links are

• Redirects

• Chained redirects

• Redirect loops

• Redirects with incorrect HTTP codes

• Other issues

Normally, a page that has been deleted should not be redirected unless there is a relevant page. However, it is not always necessary to redirect every broken link to another page.

9. Mobile usability

Google primarily relies on the mobile version of a website for indexing and ranking purposes. It is always advisable to ensure that the mobile version of your website is easy to navigate and readable. Here are the things to look out for when assessing mobile usability:

• Text size and other readability problems

• Inaccessible buttons

• Issues with navigation menus

• Unnecessary pop-ups

• Broken forms functionality

10. Website performance and Core Web Vitals

Website performance is a significant component of technical SEO. Normally, the speed optimization process requires you to look at the page’s performance metrics. There are several reasons why websites may run slowly, including:

• Large image sizes

• Unnecessary JavaScript

• Unoptimized CSS

• Poor server response

• Lack of caching

• Unwanted third-party scripts

Ideally, you want to optimize your website’s speed to offer a good user experience. However, it is always advisable to prioritize real-world user experience over a high performance score.

11. Canonical tag issues

One of the best ways to avoid indexation issues is to ensure that the canonical tags are set up correctly. For the best results, website owners should ensure the following:

• No pages with similar content are marked as canonical.

• All HTTP tags have valid URLs

• Canonical tags point to the most important URLs.

• All versions of a URL are merged.

• All irrelevant URLs are removed.

12. Backlink profile issues

Links from other websites enhance the credibility of your own website. As such, it is always a good idea to ensure that you have a healthy backlink profile. When undertaking a backlink audit, your attention should be drawn to the following:

• Relevant backlinks

• Lost backlinks

• Anchor texts

• Harmful or spammy backlinks

• Referring domains

13. Google Search Console issues

Google Search Console (GSC) allows you to track website performance in Google. It is advisable to review GSC regularly and address the following issues:

• Clicks

• Impressions

• Average position

• CTR

• Queries

• Core Web Vitals

• Index coverage

• Manual actions

Ideally, you should optimize pages with high impressions and low clicks. You should also focus on queries that help you rank in positions 8-20, as these are easily improvable.

How to Address Website Issues Found During an SEO Audit

Now that you know some of the issues that should be addressed during an SEO audit, it is time to learn how to handle them. Some tasks are more urgent and should be prioritized over others. Here are some of the issues that require your immediate attention during an SEO audit:

High-priority issues

These are problems that should be resolved right away. Examples include:

• Pages that are not indexed even though they should be

• Issues with robots.txt

• Server-side errors

• Incorrect canonical tags

• Mobile usability issues

• Broken website sections

Medium-priority issues

After addressing high-priority issues, it is time to turn your attention to medium-priority problems. These include:

• Poor internal linking

• Uninformative, non-unique, or missing page titles

• Duplicate meta tags

• Thin or outdated content

• Broken internal links

• Slow page loading

Low-priority issues

The last category includes grammar and style issues, as well as other problems that do not require much time and effort. It is important to address them after resolving high- and medium-level issues.

SEO Audit Checklist to Use

Below is a brief SEO audit checklist that you can use to spot issues during an audit:

• Google indexing issues

• robots.txt analysis

• Sitemap review

• Page title optimization

• Meta descriptions

• Heading tags

• Keyword analysis

• Search intent

• Thin content or outdated content issues

• Internal linking issues

• Broken links

• Redirects

• Canonical tags

• Mobile usability

• Page speed

• Core Web Vitals

• Structured data and rich snippets

• Backlink profile issues

• Google Search Console issues

• Rankings and organic traffic

Conclusion

An SEO audit becomes a necessity when you want to know the issues slowing down the website's ranking. When you utilize an SEO audit checklist, you can get many things sorted at once, including both the technical and content problems that hinder the website from gaining more visitors. While at first sight the idea of providing yourself with a checklist may seem difficult, the listed issues are usually divided into groups according to their urgency levels. The higher the level of urgency, the more effort you are supposed to put into solving the problem.